JEDDAH, 11 October 2003 — The feebleness, even on a rhetorical level, of the official Arab response to Israel’s bombing raid deep inside Syrian territory has given rise to renewed lamentations over the humiliating impotence of the Arab world. As the Arab News editorial the following day said, “Impotence is a strong word, but impotence is precisely what Arabs on the street feel.” However, the impotence so widely perceived and felt in the region is not an objective reality. It is a political choice.
While its leaders may not realize it, the Arab world is not impotent. Indeed, it has it within its power to achieve Middle East peace with some measure of justice — not in some distant future but soon, and not through more violence but through the intelligent and responsible application of restrained but sustained economic pressure. A concerted, concrete and effective plan of action could take the form of a simple, easily understood and ethically unimpeachable “carrot-and-stick” approach, with both carrot and stick announced simultaneously.
First, the carrot: The Arab League should formally reaffirm the wise and generous peace terms contained in its Beirut Declaration of March 2002, inspired by Crown Prince Abdullah’s courageous initiative, which offered full peace and normal diplomatic and economic relations between Israel and all Arab states in return for a total end to the occupation of all Arab lands occupied by Israel in 1967. Some doubt that this offer, which was clearly the most generous one Israel will ever receive, is still on the table. The Arab states should make clear that, at least for the time being, it is — and they should mean it.
Second, the stick: The major Arab and Muslim oil producers should state that, until Israel complies fully with international law and UN resolutions by withdrawing from all occupied Arab lands to its internationally recognized borders, they will reduce their petroleum exports by increments of five percent each month — month after month after month — and they should mean it. It would, of course, be preferable if the United States, whose unconditional support of Israel has made possible its continuing occupation of Arab lands and prevented the achievement of peace, were to undergo a moral and ethical transformation, and if Americans were suddenly to realize both that Palestinians are human beings entitled to basic human rights and that international law should be complied with by all, not only by the poor, the weak and the Arabs. Realistically, after so many years of the opposite, such a transformation is unlikely to occur.
But if Americans cannot be reached through their hearts or minds, they can be reached through their wallets. Money is the true religion of the United States. If oil prices were to soar and stock market prices were to plunge, Americans would be certain to start asking why, precisely, Israel should be permitted to continue defying international law and UN resolutions and denying Palestinians their basic human rights, and why the United States, alone, should be unconditionally supporting it in doing so — at the cost of both worldwide anti-American rage and sharply higher oil prices for Americans.
Since no American national interests are served by Israel’s continuing occupation of Arab lands, the US government could offer no credible, non-racist answers, and, with oil prices rising, stock market prices falling and no reversal of these trends in sight, these questions would become more insistent and Israel’s defiant position could rapidly become untenable. Under pressure even from the US, the Israelis might well recognize, sooner than anyone would dare to hope today, that their own security will never be ensured so long as they illegally occupy any Arab lands and that full compliance with international law and UN resolutions is profoundly in Israel’s long-term self-interest, has in any event become unavoidable and should therefore be embraced sooner rather than later. While waiting for economic discomfort to stimulate common sense and produce the result that serves the interests of all, Arab and Muslim oil producers would suffer no pain or sacrifices. Each five-percent reduction in exports should result in a greater than five-percent increase in prices, and moderate but regular reductions in exports and, unlike a sudden total embargo, should be technically, politically and psychologically sustainable.
Does no one in the Arab world recall the courageous leadership of King Faisal 30 years ago this month? For a brief moment, the Arab world was respected. “Respect” is not a word anyone would associate with the Arab world today. Rather, as Western occupation armies rule Iraq and top figures in the Bush administration talk publicly of redrawing the map of the region to better serve Israeli and American interests, the Arab world’s status approaches that of Africa when the imperial powers gathered at the Berlin Conference of 1885 to carve the continent up among themselves.
There is nothing inevitable about this. Impotence is not an unavoidable fact, and despair and resignation are not the only options. The source of the strength, which King Faisal wielded so effectively, is still there. All that is needed is the courage and leadership to use it wisely.
— John V. Whitbeck is an international lawyer who writes frequently on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
